Saturday morning, I spent a lot of the walk to the Bricken farm wondering why they still lived there. Mr. Bricken’s work was in Carrollton, and they for sure could afford a big house in town. It was Mrs. Bricken’s old family home place, but she traveled too much to make her seem very sentimental about home. I decided it must have to do with money, and God knows I didn’t know the first thing about making money.
I drove Paul to town in his Model T and then stood around Dickson’s for two hours or so while Paul bought a summer suit complete with hat, suspenders, and wing tips. Out of the whole getup, I might have been able to afford the suspenders.
I didn’t begrudge Paul any of it, but it was hard not to compare the upward swing in his life with the direction mine was taking. I stood back while he chatted up the folks who stopped to ask questions about the Model T sitting outside. Nobody said much more than hello to me, but I didn’t have any more to say back, so it didn’t really matter.
Then Mary Albrecht walked past the store, and the front window was like a big picture frame around her and Bill Wheaton. There was her hand tucked into his elbow with his fat paw holding it there. She tilted her head back, laughing, not quite laying her cheek on his arm, her eyes telling him he was Sir Lancelot, Hiawatha, and Santa Claus all rolled into one. Some little hope I hadn’t quite admitted to myself died, and it felt like a fire going out.
On the way back to Wakenda, Paul said, “What say we stop at Charlie’s for a few?”
What say. I wondered if the way Paul talked didn’t put people off about as much as his blindness did. But that was probably my mood doing the thinking.
Before I could answer, he said, “I’m buying, of course.”
Of course. “Sure, Paul, whatever you say.” I wasn’t feeling very social, but it was going on suppertime and that was reason enough to avoid home.
I parked the Ford without scaring the horses at the hitching post too much. We waited for Charlie to finish measuring off some calico for Georgia Kelly, and then we bought beers at the counter. Three men were arguing politics at one of the round tables, but otherwise it was just Charlie and Claude Hutchison. No need for a fire today, but Claude was curled up asleep next to the stove in the corner anyway. Habit, I guess.
Paul made his way toward the debate, pulled up a chair, and started right in with his opinions of Taft and the men in Congress. I sat down and finished a beer without coughing up a word. Then they all started arguing about some prizefight coming up, and I was even less interested. Paul finally asked if I was okay, and I said I needed some air.
I sat at the edge of the ravine behind Charlie’s store and threw rocks into the shallow water below. I was full of some kind of hurt I couldn’t put a name to and anger pointed at nobody in particular, and each rock I hurled made me feel a little lighter. It was already too dark to see them hit, but every plop was some small satisfaction.
After half an hour, there were footfalls behind me.
“John? Are you out here?”
“Yeah, over here.” Find me yourself, Paul.
“John?” The uneasiness in his voice made me ashamed.
“Here I am.” I turned around and squinted. “Three yards in front of you. Sittin’ on the ground.”
He shuffled forward and folded his skinny legs next to me. He was cradling two bottles and wrestled the top off one before handing it to me. “That Troutman . . . It’s worth starting a disagreement just to get him going.” He chuckled, then took a long swallow. “Say, this reminds me of when we used to go fishing.”
Except it’s dark. Then I realized it always had been dark for him. I almost said it out loud anyway, just because.
When we used to go fishing. I shook my head. Not that I’d taken him. Not that I’d taught him. Not that I’d been assigned to be his companion those summer days and wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
A minute later, his nose pointed up like he’d caught a whiff of something. “What’s wrong? Did I do something?”
I didn’t answer.
“Please. Say something.”
I threw a rock across the ravine hard as I could. “Aw, Paul, look. It’s not got to do with you.” Then I thought better and said, “I don’t mean look. That’s just an expression—”
“Well, is there anything I can do to help?”
I laughed, then felt sorry for doing it. My day to be sorry, seemed like. “Thanks, but I don’t know what it’d be.” Quick as I could draw breath, I changed the subject. “So tell me. How’s it goin’ with the Ford? Who’s been drivin’ you around?”
Whip-poor-will? came a call from a distance.
“It’s going all right.” His tone made me doubt it. “I’ve been out only three times before today. Once with Stamp Grady, once with Herman Schneider, and once with Father. He decided that if I were going to own an automobile, he should know how to drive it.”
I grinned into the night. “How’d that go?”
“Not well.”
“Well, I heard about what happened with Stamp.” No need to make him say it. What happened was that Stamp thought he had the Ford in reverse and broke through the railing and onto the sidewalk in front of Falke’s store in town. He nearly flattened the little Lybarger girl and put the fear of God and Henry Ford into her mother. It took three men to lift the Model T down to the street while Paul stood by red-faced.
His answer was sober as it gets. “Yes, I’m sure you heard.”
“Well, what about Herman? I didn’t hear anything about that.”
“He . . .” Paul’s voice dropped so low I had to lean toward him. “I asked him to take me to Carrollton for a Sunday afternoon discussion group. He wasn’t interested in it, of course, so I told him to just come back in two hours or so. He . . . went off and left me.” Paul took a pull on his beer. “He felt awful about it, or so he said. He’d gone to Bogard and gotten carried away taking his girlfriend and her family for rides. By the time he came back, somebody else had taken me home.”
I sent my empty bottle sailing into the slough. Paul’s followed a few seconds later.
I said, “How about I go in and bring us a couple more? I got nowhere to be.” Paul reached for his pocket, and I said, “On me this time.”
Who? Who-whooo? came from across the ravine.
I came back with an armload and explained that Charlie was getting ready to close. We drank for a while, listening to the crickets.
Paul said, “What about you?”
My laugh sounded sloppy. “What about me?”
“Well, you don’t have to say. But are you sure I didn’t do something?”
“Naw, it ain’t you. It’s just everything else.”
He sat there waiting for more.
Damn it. “It’s just . . . I gotta decide what I’m gonna do with myself, I guess. That about sums it up.”
“Well, I’m a pretty good listener, if that does you any good.”
“Aw, hell. I don’t know what to say.” I launched another bottle into the slough.
“Well, what do you want for yourself?”
Didn’t he know how to let something go? “I don’t know. I mean, what me and Little Jim do at the elevator, that’s a boy’s job. Difference is, someday he’s gonna own the whole shebang.” I uncapped a new bottle. “I’d rather pull my own head off than work with Dad, and I got no designs on workin’ on the river, but anything else would probably take goin’ off to college. Not much else around here.”
“So go.”
“Right.” I snorted. “It’d take a miracle on the order of Moses on the mountaintop to pay for it. And anyway, they’d want to know what I aimed to study, and all I know is what I don’t want to do. I’d be pissin’ into the wind and payin’ to do it.”
I wiped my face with my free hand, and it felt a little rubbery. “How about you? You already doin’ . . . what you planned?” I had no idea what he did with his days. I’d never given it a thought.
“Hardly.” He got to his feet, took a dozen steps away, and took a
piss.
Back and with a fresh beer, he blurted out, “This isn’t my home, you know,” like he was in the middle of some story in his head. “Not really. I’d only spent a few summers here up until a year ago. And I do not want to spend the rest of my life depending on my father for everything. Not that I do, but he thinks I does. Do. You know what I mean.” He took a swig. “He just assumes I have to live here, but I don’t.”
I started peeling the label off the bottle in my hand. “But where else would you go? Back to St. Louis?”
“I don’t know where I’d go.” Paul started peeling his label too. I wondered if he could hear what I was doing or if it’s just instinct when you mix beer and philosophy. “I could go back—they offered me a teaching position at the School for the Blind—but that’s no more than choosing the only other place I know my way around. And I don’t know how many more Septembers I could stand.”
I tried to see the sense in that but finally had to ask.
He told me how the first day of school every year, little kids coming in were paired up with older students to help them find their way around and learn the routines—and how some years he’d been paired up with a six-year-old who had mostly been locked in his room like a caged animal since he was born.
“All the little kids cry for their mothers at first. By Christmas, they cry at having to leave and visit their families.”
“Why would that be?”
“Well, in some ways, the school is a haven. Blindness is normal there, and you get used to that. But then Parents’ Weekend comes along and you can practically smell the fear and shame in the air. And then you feel like you’re at the school just so you can be hidden away. It’s a relief when the families go home. By the time Christmas comes, nobody wants to leave school. And it all starts over, every September.”
I knew anything I said would sound ignorant.
“I don’t want to close myself off from the outside world. But I sure as heck don’t feel normal here, living with Mother and Father and the rest of the townsfolk.” He pointed his bottle at me. “Present company excluded, of course. I don’t know. I think what I need to do is to see America.”
I weighed those words for a minute and asked what he meant.
“Get a fresh view,” he answered, and it still didn’t sound like he was kidding. “See if there’s somewhere I fit in, something I can do besides teach blind kids or tune pianos.”
“You can tune pianos?”
He withered me with a sigh. “Yes. And make brooms. All the things blind people are particularly suited for.”
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
I tried to get back on track. “How would you do it, though? Buy a train ticket and just get off in every town?”
“No.” Paul sounded tired. “I don’t know. It’s just something I think about sometimes—that’s all.”
I was due to take a leak and wandered off into the dark.
When I got back, I started in the middle of a thought. “You ever think about our folks? They just got on with it, right after school. Your dad at the bank, my dad farmin’—that was that. Seems so easy.”
“How do you know it was easy?”
Some late-season ducks squawked their way north overhead.
“Maybe they hated it. Maybe they just couldn’t get up the . . . gumption to go anywhere or do anything else.”
“Well, hell’s bells.” I ripped a handful of grass out by the roots and launched that into the wind. “I can’t just sit here till I feel stuck.”
“I know. But what, then? We’re just talking in circles.” He hatched a slow smile. “Well, at least I knocked a huge hole in Father’s assumptions when I bought the auto, for whatever that’s worth.”
We both chuckled.
A minute later, the idea hit both of us like a singular lightning bolt.
“The car—”
“Oh my God!”
We started talking at the same time, and neither of us in sentences, but it was clear what we meant. My head was buzzing, and I felt like I was on fire from the inside out. Like I’d grabbed onto a loose electrical wire and not let go.
Paul’s grin lit up the dark. “Why not? Why in the holy name of God not?”
We laughed like it was the best joke we’d ever heard.
When we calmed down enough, we straightaway started talking about where we should go. It wasn’t until later I realized neither one of us suggested setting out without a plan. Limited thinking or limited courage, I don’t know.
Paul suggested New York, then threw that idea away even before I could. He said on second thought, crowded and dirty would be okay to come across, but they didn’t make for much of a destination.
I agreed like I was worldly as all get-out, but really the notion of New York City was more than I could wrap my mind all the way around.
Paul said, “Could we make California by the Fourth of July? We could go see the championship fight.”
It seems impossible now, but I didn’t even ask what he was talking about. I guessed it was the prizefight they’d been arguing about inside. But all I could really think when I heard California was gold-rush hooligans and earthquakes. I said that last one out loud.
We knew what had happened to San Francisco in 1906—the ground had opened up and done its best to swallow the whole city. Four years later, it wasn’t even close to rebuilt.
We fell damn silent for two fellows who’d been whooping it up just the minute before.
Then Paul spoke up, quiet as a prayer. “Yellowstone National Park.”
I thought about it. Prairies and deserts and mountains. Cities and small towns and open space in between all of them. And at the end of it, land so beautiful the president had set it aside for the sole purpose of being looked at. “Yes,” I said.
I don’t know how long we sat watching the pictures in our heads before Paul spoke again. “Should we ask someone else to come with us?”
“Why?”
“Won’t you want somebody else to handle part of the driving?”
I hadn’t thought about the fact I’d be the only pair of eyes. “Yes, yes, I would, I guess. But who?”
After that night, we never did agree whose idea Henry Brotherton was. The answer was probably lost somewhere in the nest of empty beer bottles around us.
I was still plenty sore at Henry for embarrassing me that day at Charlie’s, and I know I pointed out to Paul that Henry could be a mean little shit. That he enjoyed being one.
Paul said something like, “But if there’s trouble, wouldn’t you want to have someone like him on your side?”
“There is absolutely no guarantee he would be.” Of this, I was sure.
But it didn’t take long to run all the way through the list of other fellows we knew. They were all tied to jobs or getting married. They’d already settled. Henry Brotherton, though—well, he’d lived like a stray dog most of his life. There was nothing tying him down.
Mainly, we were caught up in the idea and not too worried about the details. Henry was better than nobody, and that’s as much as it mattered to us then.
We were fairly swimming in courage when we lit out in the Model T for George Reimer’s farm. That’s where Henry worked, and Paul had said he was sleeping in George’s barn.
“How in the hell do you know that?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “People talk in front of a blind man like he can’t hear either.”
I parked the car out on the road. George Reimer is a friendly man, but it’s hardly ever a good idea to surprise a man on his own property after bedtime.
Just inside the barn door, the moon lit up a pile of loose hay. No telling what was in it. We stood in the doorway calling out, “Hen-reee,” like a pair of cowardly ghosts.
Pretty soon, there was a commotion up in the loft.
I said, “I bet he’s got a girl up there and he’s tryin’ to hide her.”
Paul whispered, “I bet he’s got a gun up there and he’s trying to find i
t.”
My head started to ache. I was sobering up fast.
About then, a wiggling bedroll shot down like a bomb from the loft into the hay pile in front of us. Paul and I both jumped a foot in the air.
Henry roundhoused out of the blankets like a cat fighting its way out of a gunnysack. His eyes looked as wild as his tangled red hair. But then they started to focus.
He’d still been asleep when he fell—that was all. He was just waking up, after the fact.
Like that was any better.
“What the hell are you two doing here?” He struck a pose, dukes up. He was a head shorter but probably had fifteen pounds on me, all muscle.
Paul looked like he’d been hit upside the head with a skillet.
I said, “Uh . . . we came to ask you something.”
“Well, what?” Henry still stood at the ready.
I said, “We’re goin’ to take Paul’s Ford and drive to Yellowstone National Park, and we want you to go along.” There in the barn, with the beer wearing off, it sounded downright silly.
“Tonight?” Henry took a couple steps away.
“Naw, not tonight. We don’t know when. We just got the idea . . .” I was becoming a bigger fool every second.
Henry advanced on me, studying my face. “You two drunk?”
“A little.” Paul was back. “But we’re sober enough to mean it.”
“Well, then, what the hell are you talking about?” Henry’s fists finally relaxed.
“Just what we said.”
Paul nodded.
“We wanna get away. Go somewhere. See stuff. We need another driver, and you’re our first choice. But we can ask someone else.”
“Yes.” Paul was still nodding. “We can.”
“Oh, now, just hold it. What—hey, you got any left of what you been drinkin’?”
There were three beers in the Model T, put back just for this.
“Wait right here,” I said.
The two of them were sitting cross-legged in the hay when I got back. I handed beers around.
Paul asked Henry, “Why are you living here?” He sounded as polite as Sunday school.
Seeing America Page 3
